Postcards from Paradigm
by DareDelvil
Summary: Snapshots from the city of amnesia... a collection of short fan fiction. See inside for full summary. HIATUS, no new chapters planned for the time being.


**Title: Postcards from Paradigm**

**Author: DareDelvil**

**Fandom: Big O                                 **

**Description: _Postcards_ is a collection of short fanfics, usually based around a single Act or concept.  They are not designed to be in any particular order – rather, they are meant to be snapshots of a small period of time, hence the title.  **

**Disclaimer: I don't own anything.  Really.  If I did, there'd be a Season Three.  **

**Author's Note: Hello to everyone out there!  If you've followed the link from my author page and know little or nothing about Big O, you can just take this as a story, or you could go looking for background info if it takes your fancy.  Anyone who's come here from the Big O section, hi, please tell me if anyone's drastically out of character in your opinion.  If you know Big O and you've seen me before, as above, sorry for being away for so long.  I will update the other stuff eventually…really!  Notice to all _Trouble With Girls_ readers: I'm almost done on the second part of Chapter Seven, so look for an update soon, hopefully.  **

**Last but not least, to everyone…please leave me a review, I love hearing from you all.  **

**Spoiler warning: Only to those very new to Big O.  Based on Act 3, with reference to Act 1.**

**In Blue**

She finds him disagreeable, the so-called 'gentleman' who owns this great house.  He is short-tempered, gruff, and sometimes so idiosyncratic as to verge on the eccentric, but this would be bearable if it were not for his attitude towards certain people – specifically, towards women.  No one, he had often said, could enter his house without good reason…with the exception of lovely young women, who could enter unconditionally, and come and go as they pleased.  That privilege had been offered to her, at first.  Until he realised that 'Miss Wayneright' was an android, whereupon he declared that his butler must have been senile to mistake her for a woman.  In fact, he made it quite clear that she should never have entered the house at all. 

That blonde woman, on the other hand…

She lifts the lid of the piano and takes the stool, a tune already catching in her flawless mind like a fly in a cobweb.  Like the spider, she snatches it up and devours it, losing herself in the bittersweet taste as her fingers find the keys.  No one is really listening when she begins to play, and no one would care much for the melody if they were.  It is an old tune, older than the mind that contains it, older than the piano that sings it…perhaps even older than the city itself.  Such things are quite forgotten – here in Paradigm City, blue has long since ceased to be a feeling.  She plays from her bloodless heart, longing for something she cannot name, swaying gently from side to side in a manner so strange, yet somehow so natural. 

Yet natural she can never be, as she is abruptly reminded by harsh words in her gentleman's voice –

"How many times do I have to tell you that it's pointless to just imitate us?"

Not that she could ever **really** forget it, in this house. 

She returns to her usual posture, stiff and upright, fixing him with her unblinking stare as he enters the room.  The melody still drifts from the piano. 

"Anyway, how come you're playing the blues?" he asks her.  He can be surprisingly dull-witted, this negotiator – even if he is one of the few who remembers that blue is more than a colour.  But she cannot explain herself, will she or no, for she cannot match a word to the feeling of being slowly trodden into the dust by everyone around her.  Musical expression is the only form of communication she has left, and so far the results are not encouraging.  So she settles for enigmatic, her answer nicely calculated to keep him guessing…and drop a suitably momentous bombshell at the same time. 

"Even I sometimes feel like playing them.  Is there anything wrong with that?"

He stops and stares. 

"**Feel** like it?"

She looks back, expressionless.  Yes, Roger Smith, she feels.  Would she could tell you how.  Her very existence screams silently for acknowledgement, yet she knows he cannot see her.  She is just wires and metal to him, not thought, but calculation.  And **certainly** not feeling – heaven forbid an android should dare to hate, or love, or want.  Or even all three, locked together in a tangled mess that, somehow, she cannot bear to unravel. 

At length, he shrugs and smiles.  "If you say so."

He leaves her to the music, not bothering to try to understand her.  How very human of him, she considers, to disregard her feelings so easily.  The blonde woman would have been good for him.  Would have been, for the calling card lies torn in the wastepaper basket.  Torn by her fingers.  She knows it is selfish, and probably out of character (if, she interjects silently, she even **has** a character), but she will not let him be taken from her so easily. 

Disagreeable louse though he is, he is all she has. 

Perhaps one day he will realise that, if she plays it clearly enough. 


End file.
